[The 9/11 commision's] mandate is "to provide a 'full and complete accounting' of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future."... It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events....

Consider: How would an understanding of the world on June 27, 1914, have helped anyone guess what was to happen next? The rise of Hitler, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Internet bubble: not only were these events unpredictable, but anyone who correctly forecast any of them would have been deemed a lunatic (indeed, some were). This accusation of lunacy would have also applied to a correct prediction of the events of 9/11 — a black swan of the vicious variety.

"Caller ID for E-Mail: The Next Step to Deterring Spam" is the Microsoft draft specification to address the widespread problem of domain spoofing. Domain spoofing refers specifically to the use of someone else's domain name when sending a message, and is part of the larger spoofing problem, the practice of forging the sender's address on e-mail messages.

Caller ID for e-mail would verify that each e-mail message originates from the Internet domain it claims to come from. Eliminating domain spoofing will help legitimate senders protect their domain names and reputations, and help recipients more effectively identify and filter junk e-mail.

This is a solution to the spam problem of two years ago. Now that spammers control massive relay networks via the Windows viruses that are now literally pop up daily, and send their spam through those relays, source authentication is merely going to complete the push toward using relay networks.

Like many others in this country, I was pleasently surprised by the quality of The Apprentice, the show on NBC that if I have to explain, you will not want to read the rest of this post.

Considered as a game, Apprentice is almost identical to Survivor, with one major difference: The selection criterion for elimination. In Survivor, it is the majority vote of the rest of your tribe. In Apprentice, it is the selection of Donald Trump. Trump is a billionaire who has been to the brink and back, and whether I'd like him as a person or not, I do respect the results he has in the business arena.

This is a good text on the the impact that how we think of policing has on the real world.

Some of the Nigerian spammers are getting lazy. I just got one that has the tale of woe where somebody kicks the bucket and leaves behind Twenty-Four Point Seven Million Dollars, and the fact that our desperate correspondant needs to get the money out of the account, but neglects the part where he needs your help to do it. Instead, it just makes vague reference to "your portion of the fund is subject to negotiation" with no explanation given as to why you would have any claim to a "portion of the fund".

People are altogether too cavalier about ascribing motivations to others. If sometakes takes an action A, and someone wishes to accuse them of motivation M, the person will ask themselves, "Does M explain why A was done?" If so, then the accusations fly!

Yet that question is seriously fallacious and will only produce a true statement accidentally at best. The correct question is, "Given that a person has motivation M, would they consider A to be their best action?" (One must also consider other circumstances, such as intelligence, but this is the basic question.)

In general, I find post-modernism to be psuedo-intellectual clap-trap, but it does have one very valuable concept, the narrative.

Post-modernism is a nebulous philosophy by its very nature, and getting a concrete definition even from the experts is very difficult, partially because most or all of them will deny the very possibility of a concrete definition at all. My understanding is that the core post-modern point is that we construct our view of the world in terms of narratives, which are basically stories we use to explain the world around us. We use a broad definition of the word "story" here, so not just "boy meets girl" or "fairy tales", but including explanations like "Gravity decreases in strength as the square of the distance, which is why orbits work" or "Those neo-con nutcases are conspiring to bring down society in devious ways, which is why I don't have a job".

As I define privacy, privacy only matters when another human sees the privacy-sensitive information. As long as GMail only allows their computers to scan the emails for Ad Words, there really isn't a privacy breach. To the extent they collect aggregate statistics, that is in theory a privacy breach but one so diffuse that it is not practically worth worrying about.

Of course, the moment a human reads your email or personally examines you, your privacy is infringed... but there is nothing special to GMail about that. Unless you run your own mail server and all your email, both sent and received, is encrypted, a wide variety of strangers have full access to your email messages already.

While Google may theoretically be able to do some scanning with their technology, again, there is nothing special to Google about this. If the goverment wants your email, they can subpoena it from AOL as easily as GMail.

Well, Iron Lute is getting firmly placed on the back burner, 'cause I've been laid off my job and I need to concentrate on things that will make money. I do intend to get back to it but I have no idea when that will be.

Today's post is about one of the little libraries I'm developing as part of Iron Lute. In the previous posts, I've laid out what I believe were successes; today I highlight what is so far a failure for a change of pace.

Please note that today's post is really more of an XML post then an outliner post; if you're interested in programming with XML, stay tuned. If you're only interested in outlining, you should probably move on. I've tried in the previous posts to be accessible to interested laymen, but this one may also be only useful to programmers. Consider yourselves fairly warned.